A collection of thoughts, ideas, and opinions independently written by members of the MSU community and curated by MSU Libraries

Tag Archives: books

This blog gets about 100k page views per month. My sense is that there are a lot of additional views through RSS feeds and social media (FB, G+, etc.), but those are hard to track. Most of the hits are on the main landing page, with a smaller fraction going to a specific article. I’d …

“Because that’s what Hermione does,’ said Ron, shrugging. ‘When in doubt, go to the library.” ― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets Like many in my generation, I am a Harry Potter fan, and I’ve long identified with the character Hermione Granger (the series’ bookish and know-it-all heroine). Hermione was a role model for …

This was on the new books table at our local bookstore. I had almost forgotten about doing an interview and corresponding with the author some time ago. See also here and here. The book is a well-written overview of some of the more theoretical aspects of inflationary cosmology, the big bang, the multiverse, etc. It also …

The novella Gulf predates almost all of Heinlein’s novels. Online version. The book Friday (1982) is a loose sequel. Wikipedia: Gulf is a novella by Robert A. Heinlein, originally published as a serial in the November and December 1949 issues of Astounding Science Fiction and later collected in Assignment in Eternity. It concerns a secret society …

We took our son, Noah and his partner, Andy, to dinner last night at a new Thai restaurant in Detroit, Katoi. The menu was unique to my culinary experience. The mix of tastes and combinations of ingredients was so distinctive, that I could not possibly imagine what these combinations might taste like. I was struck …

I read The Oligarchs: Wealth And Power In The New Russia many years ago. A passage which I found fascinating, and still remember today, describes the explorations of reformist Soviet economists toward market economics and price signals. Imagine groping dimly most of your adult life for subtle but monumental concepts that lie far down a …

Keri Duncan Valentine and Lucas John Jensen recently released a new book entitled Examining the Evolution of Gaming and Its Impact on Social, Cultural, and Political Perspectives. I was fortunate enough to have a chapter accepted for the book… and that no one complained when I subtitled it “Dilemmas and Dragons.” A lot of my …

Highly recommended! I blogged about this guy 5 years ago here: From physics to Goldman to Y Combinator. The book is hilarious and pretty accurate, AFAICT. I don’t know much about Facebook corporate culture or that particular era of ad monetization, but the finance and startup stuff all rings true. The reality is, Silicon Valley …

I was at Foo Camp the last few days. This year they kept the size a bit lower (last year was kind of a zoo) and I thought the vibe was a lot more relaxed and fun. Many thanks to the O’Reilly folks for running this wonderful meeting and for inviting me. My first time …

March is still roaring a bit, though with Mid-Michigan temperatures eking into the 60s it’s a bit more like a purr. Nevertheless, you have to squint pretty hard to see the crocuses peeking out of the ground or the little spots of green that will be turning into budding leaves in the coming weeks. I …

Punya Mishra recently posted to his blog a digital version of a book that several of us in MSU’s Educational Psychology and Educational Technology program worked on together. It’s not your typical academic book; I think Punya puts it best in his description of it: Graduate school can be a grind. Academia can be dull …

Philip K. Dick’s first science fiction story 15 year old Philip K. Dick’s short story The Slave Race (his first published science fiction) appeared in the Young Authors’ Club column of The Berkeley Gazette (1944). From Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick by Lawrence Sutin. In the future, androids created to ease humans’ …

Nothing about Ivan the Engine Driver this week, just a few random thoughts as we round the corner into Thanksgiving weekend. I’m eating breakfast in a distant city (again) this week and I’m sitting there sipping my coffee with a copy of my book From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone sitting on the …

From Bobos in Paradise by David Brooks. This part of Bourdieu’s oeuvre is, of course, required reading for all academics. By academics, I don’t just mean humanists and social scientists. Even those in the hardest of sciences and technology would benefit from considering the political / symbolic economy of their field. Why, exactly, did most …

“Forgive him anything, he writes like an angel.” Remember that the life of this world is but a sport and a pastime. NYTimes obituary. From a 2011 post: I’ve been a fan of the writer James Salter (see also here) since discovering his masterpiece A Sport and a Pastime. Salter evokes Americans in France as …

I spent most of last week on a mini book tour to promote my new book From Field to Fork: Food Ethics for Everyone. It was fun and pretty well received at all four of the West Coast locations. In Berkeley, CA a skeptical gentleman asked me to talk a bit about the case for …

This is Barnard professor Perry Mehrling on the origin of interest rate and credit derivatives in the mind of Fischer Black. I highly recommend Mehrling’s biography of Black, which I discussed previously here: Black was both an undergrad and grad student at Harvard in physics. He didn’t really complete his PhD in physics, but sort of …

This episode of Spencer Writes in the Library took place Thursday, February 12th around 1:15pm. The Spot Where am I working today? I really think that the second floor of the west wing of the library is my new favorite spot. I keep finding new places that I didn’t know about: Today’s is a set …

I wonder whether Yuval Harari is related to the physicist Haim Harari. Yuval Noah Harari discusses his new book, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, which explores the ways in which biology and history have defined us and enhanced our understanding of what it means to be human. One hundred thousand years ago, at least …

The theme for ‘food ethics icons’ month is the world hunger/population growth tangle. Our thinking has been bracketed by two opposing nostrums: On the one hand, agriculture is in a race with population growth, on the other hand, the problem is not agriculture but the distribution of food we already have. Both of these are …

Science is sometimes frustrating. The work is often repetitive and even tedious. It can be hard to explain to our friends and families—and sometimes even to peers—what we’re doing and why we think it’s important and interesting. The current state of the academic job market is terrible. But science is also often fun. There’s the joy …

This episode of Spencer Writes in the Library took place Monday, January 5th around 9:30am. The Spot Where am I working today? Back in the MSU Library! Since the semester hasn’t quite started yet, the library is relatively empty, allowing me to try out different working spots that I usually wouldn’t. Today, I’m sitting in …

Another recommendation: China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa by Howard French (a former Africa and China correspondent for the NY Times). This is real boots on the ground reporting. French (a Mandarin speaker) spent time with Chinese immigrants across Africa, from small shopkeepers and farmers to real …

I recommend this podcast interview with Thomas Kuhne, author of Belonging and Genocide: Hitler’s Community, 1918-1945. Kuhne claims that no German soldier ever faced court martial for refusing to kill a civilian. He estimates that (only?) about 200k German soldiers in total were involved in the killing of Jews or other civilians. But by the …

Well, I’m back. It is much harder to stay on top of this blog than I thought during busy times of the semester. There is a week and a half until my grades are submitted and hopefully I am a little less busy. I do have a lot of articles saved up to share, though, …

A few weeks ago, I read an article on the ebooks vs. paper books debate that really frustrated me. I wasn’t upset because the article came down on the side of paper books. After all, I was slow to embrace my Kindle and continue to think that there’s something magical about flipping actual pages; furthermore, …

Archival work reveals that Hannah Arendt (Eichmann in Jerusalem) and many other observers were fooled by Eichmann during his trial. He was more than a cog, not merely banal, and did indeed think about his actions during the Holocaust. Bettina Stangneth’s recent book, Eichmann before Jerusalem is fascinating reading. NYTimes: … The story of the …

Inspired by the topics discussed in this earlier post, I’ve been reading Michael Nielsen’s online book on neural nets and deep learning. I particularly liked the subsection quoted below. For people who think deep learning is anything close to a solved problem, or anticipate a near term, quick take-off to the Singularity, I suggest they …

I just finished reading Svante Paabo’s autobiography, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes. The book is perfect — if you’re a biologist of any kind, you’ll understand most of it without any trouble, and even physicists can probably get a lot out of the story (heh). The book describes Svante Paabo’s journey towards sequencing …

Leonard Lopate interviews Nicholas Wade (veteran genetics correspondent for the NYTimes) about his new book A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History. The interview is slow at first but the second half is good. I received a copy of the book from the publisher. My initial impressions: 1. The first part of the book …

Carl Sagan asserts that books are proof that humans can work magic. It is with this concept in mind that the story of Marina Keegan makes the most sense. Marina was a 22 year old writer and a Yale graduate when her essay, “The Opposite of Loneliness”, was published in a special edition of the …

Books are expensive; textbooks are outrageously expensive. And heavy. So even if you’re a die-hard print lover, this list of free books available online can ease your burden (both financially and physically). The first and most obvious is the heavy hitter: Project Gutenberg. Project Gutenberg runs off of donations and impressively manages to provide over 42,000 …

Over on Twitter, a poster was interested in learning more about evolution and how it works. I suggested the poster begin with Evolution 101, a website produced by the University of California Museum of Paleontology. I then recommended four superb books (including one suggested by another poster). These are all written with wonderful style and …

I’m sure that everyone is wondering what I’ve been reading these days. [Well actually I’m being facetious. I don’t for a minute think that anyone woke up on a February morning thinking to themselves, “Gosh! It’s bothering me that I haven’t the foggiest notion what Paul Thompson has been reading of late.” But it’s a …